I. B. Singer's "The Captive": A False Messiah in the Promised Land

I. B. SINGER'S "THE CAPTIVE": A FALSE MESSIAH IN THE PROMISED LAND Julian C. Rice Florida Atlantic University A recurrent theme in the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer concerns the effect and especially the value of the Enlightenment upon the Jewish people. Singer treats this theme with characteristic ambiguity, although frequently the Enlightenment makes it necessary for some of his more sensitive characters to "sit shivah" for their illusions. On the other hand the Enlightenment was productive of illusions and, although it is hard to conceive of this now, twenty-seven years after the founding of Israel, there was a time when many Jews thought Zionism was another false Messianic movement with Theodor Herzl as its Sabbatai Zevi. As translator Jacob Sloan points out in his introduction to Satan in Goray, "the long tradition of Jewish Messianism, associated since the days of the followers of Jesus with a universalistic rejection of the Law, persists to the twentieth century, to find its final expression in the cosmopolitan person of the journalist Theodor Herzl. It is, I think, undeniable that for many Jews Zionism has represented a secularized Messianic movement."1 A clear skepticism toward the Messianic aspects of Zionism forms the thematic substance of a new Singer story, which is one of a very few that he has set primarily in Israel. "The Captive" appears in his recent collection A Crown of Feathers, and while the story reflects an impression of Israel, which does not accord with Zionist idealism, it is important to preface a discussion of its sense of Israel's limitations with a quotation from a recent interview in which Singer expresses a sincere emotional support for the Jewish state: "Israel is a great hope for the Jewish people. It is true that when I was in Israel five years ago, I found there things which I didn't like. But you find these things in your home or in your own heart. Am I so delighted with myself and my writing?"2 Although Singer is in no sense an anti-Zionist, perhaps the "things" which he did not like in Israel can be specifically identified within the interesting metaphorical structure of "The Captive." To countless Diaspora generations, Eretz Yisroel was a symbol of deliverance from the yoke of Gentile oppression. In "The Captive" Singer implies that while the Jewish people have achieved physical and material freedom in Israel, they have partially become psychological 270Notes captives of the value systems of their former oppressors. The major characters are all "possessed" by the spirit of a Polish Jew, an impressionist painter, Zorach Kreiter, who is a comic archetype of an "enlightened one." As a Jewish intellectual and artist ofthe 1920s, Zorach epitomizes all those vices of transgression and excess which traditional Judaism had resisted. He is a caricature of theJewishattemptto emulate conventionally Gentile, Rabelaisian accomplishment: "Kreiter could eat twenty rolls during a meal and fast for the next three days. He could lie down on a park bench and sleep without interruption for ten hours. He once had intercourse with a half-dozen prostitutes, one right after the other."3 Ofcourse, being a painter was in itself an enlightened profession considering the traditional injunctions against the graven image. But even though he "conquers Paris" with his paintings, Zorach Kreiter eventually dies in a concentration camp, a macabre but profound reflection on the Jewish attempt to achieve cultural assimilation in most of Europe. Israel is an obvious answer to the problem of how to express and enjoy cultural enlightenment and still retain Jewish identity. But Zorach Kreiter emulated the worst values of European Gentile society, which have, Singer implies, become negative influences in the new Israeli society. While his real artistic abilities are questionable in the narrative flashback, Zorach was preeminently a swindler and a fraud The presence of a disturbing but unintentional dishonesty in Israeli culture is symbolized by the experience of Tobias Anfang, apainterand survivor of the holocaust, who moves to Israel only to be possessed by the ghost of Zorach Kreiter. Anfang was also an Enlightened Jew who had married a German woman, but "when Hitler came to power, the German woman swore in court that the...